Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Tips for catching up and staying on top of Project Life

My Project Life posts of late have been pages that were part of my big catch-up. A move abroad + settling in saw me fall behind in my weekly memory-keeping and though I had anticipated a few weeks of a lull, it ended up spreading to a couple months. EEP! Now that I'm mostly up-to-date, I wanted to share my tips & tricks to catching up and staying there.

As I prepared to get things back on track, I needed to get organized. Photos were being pulled from my US phone, my UK phone, The Scot's new phone, my little point-and-shoot, as well as his DSLR. So I made folders, week by week, on my desktop (as I don't like to get my iPhoto all mingled up with Instagrams and such). When I edited them I put a "to print" group in each folder and named them week by week.

Once the photos arrived, they got sorted out properly. Week by week. I also sort photos out this way when I order a big batch of prints for my regular, annual, 12x12 albums as well.

Each week's plastics get organized through popping in ephemera and sometimes notes. Nowadays, I do this each week as I live it. Went to the movies? Stubs get slipped in when we get home. Interesting business card? Slip it in. They may not always get included in the end, but I like to keep that sort of thing should I want to use it. (The weeks in prep here ended up looking like this and this.

Now that things are looking a bit more on-task, I can focus on keeping track of life on a daily basis such that it is easy peasy to put together a week's spread later on. My personal favorite helper is the Evernote app. Each week I create a new note with the days of the week and pop in any pre-planned details such as parties, events, birthdays, etc. and then as the week happens I add in little details. As you can see, the week shown (week 45) ended up not featuring all my jotted down elements, but keeping a good record of all the things that we've done during the week. I quite like Evernote because it's got a lot of options and is free.

What are your favorite ways to keep your photos and goings-on throughout the week organized? Do you have any tricks for keeping on track or getting caught up?